A Casual Guy

In a long, penetrating review of Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been, David Godkin explores the strengths and weakness of Coles's style, which he defines as:

"a poetry that is relaxed, fluid and variable in the way that good prose is fluid and variable, a casualness that is indispensable to good conversation and absolutely central to that peculiarly Oxbridgean sensibility that unfolds from Coles’ longer episodic narratives. Chatty, charming, “offhand” as Margaret Atwood and others ardent fans have put it, Coles poems are not so much pressured from beneath by the urgency of what must be said as preempted by the impulse to charm and subtly provoke his readers."

What Falls Between the Cracks

Using our own reissue as a starting point, Evan Jones tries to get to the bottom of why Anne Wilkinson's wonderful poems keep getting overlooked:

She had chops and finesse, style, substance and a verse that was steadily and uniquely her own. She fit into her age and responded to it with verve. But sometime after she had departed, her tradition turned just enough in her native country that what she was doing was deemed unattractive. That’s a shame, as what falls between the cracks in these kinds of poetical shifts is often worth as much if not more than what comes to the surface.

Get a PDF of Jones' essay here.